When Infinite and Perfect Aren’t Helpful To Me

It’s hard to imagine how big God is. I mean, He’s…really big!

And He’s good. He’s very good.

But it doesn’t do much for our thinking to say that He’s perfect and that He’s infinite. Now, before I get some hate mail, let me finish. He’s both of those things, infinite and perfect, but our minds just can’t fully grasp what’s perfect and what’s infinite. We’re not perfect. We’re not infinite. We will never be either of those.

What has helped me the most in my life is not to think of God in an abstract infinite and perfect way. I know that He is infinite and perfect but I’ve started to think of it in a different way.

When we try to think of a perfect God we try to gauge Him by our standards of right. We say that God is a just God, that He’s righteous, but what about those times when we disagree with what He does? What about when He proves Himself to be right and we’re left staring at the naivety that first caused us to think we knew best? Would we realize that He understands right and wrong far better than we ever could?

When we think of an infinite God, maybe we should realize that God will always outpace wherever we could ever hope to be. Always. As great as we might think of ourselves, God will always be greater. As smart or strong or discerning or right as we could ever hope to be, God will always be more of those than we are.

This isn’t new thinking, David talks about it in Psalm 139. Maybe it’s better to not think of some abstract understanding of infinite and perfect. Maybe we should realize that when we get to the end of who we are, that’s where God continues to exist and has existed already.